Bloomberg pushes 2012ers on guns

A gun control group led by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and backed by survivors of the 2011 Tuscon shooting is demanding in a new ad that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama take clear stances on the issue.

In the wake of Friday’s massacre in Aurora, Colo., Mayors Against Illegal Guns took out a full-page ad in Wednesday’s USA Today asking the candidates to release gun control plans. The ad is signed by 11 survivors of the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six. The daughter of one of the dead also signed the ad, which asserts that 48,000 people will die from gun violence during the next president’s four-year term.

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“Another mass shooting in America,” the ad reads. “Another moment of silence. But will the moment ever end?”

“What will the next president do to stop it?” it continues. “So far, neither candidate has been willing to address the issue head on. We cannot allow their moment of silence to turn into months and years. We can honor the lost by working together to take simple steps that protect the Second Amendment and protect the lives of innocent people.”

The ad is the start of a campaign aiming to make gun control a high-profile issue during the presidential campaign. The Tucson survivors will head to New York City to make the TV rounds and will be “making the case to a national audience that other families shouldn’t have to go through what they went through,” Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Guns, said.

Bloomberg, the group’s co-chair and main financial backer, is considering doing more to advance gun control in advance of November’s election.

“The question of how he will be involved in 2012 is something he’s thinking hard about,” Glaze told POLITICO.

Bloomberg was the first politician to argue the shooting in Aurora should reinvigorate a stalled national conversation about gun control.

“Soothing words are nice,” Bloomberg said during a radio interview Friday morning. “But maybe it’s time the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they’re going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.”

“President Obama and Governor Romney have offered sympathy for the victims of the Aurora shooting spree, but no solutions for dealing with the 34 Americans who are murdered with guns every single day,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “We have heard enough people in Washington tell us that this is not the time to talk about gun violence — now it’s time to hear from the men and women who have been directly affected by it. The Tucson survivors and families have been waiting 18 months for something to change, and they deserve to know — as do all Americans — how the men running for president plan to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.”

Glaze argued the danger of taking on the NRA is “wildly overstated,” pointing to polling released Tuesday by the mayors’ group. The poll, conducted by Republican Frank Luntz, found just under three-quarters of NRA members support background checks for anyone who buys a gun and 71 percent support a prohibition on gun purchases by people on the terror watch list.